We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
A question that occurred to me in some of the recent jousting on the Samizdata comment threads about Russia’s annexation of parts of Georgia was this: what other countries might get in the cross-hairs? It seems to me that there could be a real risk that Ukraine and the Baltic states like Latvia – many of which have Russian-speaking populations living among them – might “provoke” poor old put-upon Russia to send in the tanks. Questions:
What, if anything, will the NATO powers do about it?
What should such powers do?
Is the risk serious anyway?
The US economist and cheerleader for the Democrats, Paul Krugman, reckons that George W. Bush is a “libertarian”. To which I would respond: “If only”.
US blogger David Bernstein is equally unimpressed:
Bush and McCain are Extreme Libertarians: So says Paul Krugman: “What we really need is a government that works, because it’s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all. And that seems to be something undreamed of in either Mr. Bush’s or Mr. McCain’s philosophy.”
After eight years of “no child left behind,” Medicare expansion, aid to Africa for AIDS, drug warring, abstinence education, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth and so on, and more of the same promised by McCain, the better question is, is there any problem that Bush and McCain DON’T think government should solve?
I take those who think that the modern Republican Party is an outpost of radical libertarianism about as seriously as those who think that the Democracts are getting ready to shoot the kulaks.
Well quite.
But if Republicans want another Reagan, they should recognize that he didn’t come from nowhere, and work on their farm team.
– Glenn Reynolds. I am not quite sure about the expression “farm team”, but I am assuming that is an Americanism. I agree with the general sentiment, for all of Reagan’s drawbacks. There is no one on the political right in the English-speaking world who comes close to the Gipper. That is a shame.
I guess the Bloomberg editor who transmitted this story in error has suffered the equivalent of being thrown into a pool of sharks, as happened to a baddie who got on the wrong side of Largo in Thunderball. There has always been a Spectre-like feel about the Bloomberg news operation, not to mention a cultish aspect, even. In their London office, there are lots of fish-tanks dotted about, presumably designed to make the staff feel calmer, but you never know what sort of beasties might lurk.
There is this wonderful story – I am not sure if it is totally accurate, though – about how an employee who fell out with a notorious Bloomberg editor, called Matt Winkler, managed to transmit headlines on the service that repeated for hours, with the words: “Winkler is a Wanker – Official”.
I just love the news business.
This story will not help the blood pressure of our regular readership, I am sure:
A flagship database intended to protect every child in the country will be used by police to hunt for evidence of crime in a “shocking” extension of its original purpose.
How marvellous. Makes one’s heart swell with pride.
ContactPoint will include the names, ages and addresses of all 11 million under-18s in England as well as information on their parents, GPs, schools and support services such as social workers.
Tremendous. I almost want to sing “Land of Hope and Glory” (sarcasm alert).
The £224 million computer system was announced in the wake of the death of Victoria Climbié, who was abused and then murdered after a string of missed opportunities to intervene by the authorities, as a way to connect the different services dealing with children.
The death of this girl, like that of all children in the care of monstrous parents, is a terrible story but the creation of this database is not the answer. Punishment of the offenders surely is (I’ll leave it to the commentariat for what those punishments should be).
It has always been portrayed as a way for professionals to find out which other agencies are working with a particular child, to make their work easier and provide a better service for young people.
No doubt.
However, it has now emerged that police officers, council staff, head teachers, doctors and care workers will use the records to search for evidence of criminality and wrongdoing to help them launch prosecutions against those on the database – even long after they have reached adulthood.
And this, of course, is the nub of the issue. Governments down the ages, whether in the real world or in the dystopias of fiction writers, have sought to spot criminals ahead of their actually being criminals. I remember watching the Spielberg movie “Minority Report” – loosely based on the old Philip K. Dick novel – and wondered just how long it would take for NuLab or its equivalents to come up with an attempt to do stuff like this. Now it is becoming reality. But although the creators of such databases may like to kid themselves that they are protecting the little ones, in truth, they are placing dangerous power in the hands of state officials that can be used against people for the rest of their lives.
I am glad the Daily Telegraph is creating a stink about this. Question: will the Tories pledge to shut this database down? (Cough, nervous laughter).
A few days back, I watched a programme, or least about 15 minutes of it, that speculates on what the Earth will look like once humans disappear. There is lots of stuff about how houses, roads, bridges, airports and sewage systems start to crumble, how rats and other animals take over. There are lots of photographs of wrecked cars with plants growing out of the windows. On one level, if you are into wildlife or the study of botany, some of this is pretty interesting. The programme is very slickly put together.
There are two ways to view this film. Perhaps it taps into a very powerful theme amongst what I might call the dark Greens – the idea of Homo Sapiens as a disease, almost a curse, on the “pure” Earth. While the narrator has a civilised tone of voice, it is hard not to miss a sort of gloating at the demise of humans and their artifacts.
On the other hand, it is quite useful to be reminded of what happens once the basic infrastructure of modern civilisation goes into decline, such as electrical power, clean water, mass transportation, and so on. Which is why it matters a great deal if we forgo important sources of power generation, for example, all because of coming to the wrong conclusions about supposed Man-made climate change, for example. So maybe one perhaps unintended consequence of this sort of film is to sharply remind us of what happens when we take our modern civilisation for granted and flirt with “going back to nature”.
Jeff Randall, writing about the excellent performance by Britons so far in the Olympics, reckons some people are getting all het up about the sort of folk who have been winning the gongs:
Unfortunately, no sooner had our rowers, cyclists and sailors collected their medals than the carping started – largely on account of their successes being clocked up in “posh” sports. That a disproportionately high number of these British champions went to fee-paying schools is regarded by some as a symptom of a divided society, evidence of a deep-rooted malaise.
In place of celebration, there is consternation: dark mumblings about the benefits of privilege. In the warped view of the Grumblies, middle-class successes are to be resented, as if, like those of drugs cheats, their places on the awards podium were the result of improper behaviour.
Britain’s middle classes are already in the dock for heinous crimes, such as seeking the best schools for their children, paying extra for private healthcare and determining the output of Radio Four. Now, it seems, they must endure being rubbished for having the audacity to produce results in a sporting arena that the nation expected to be dominated by foreigners.
He has a point, but I have not sensed much of this sort of snide carping. What I tend to notice from the coverage has been how pleasant and modest most of the sportsmen and women, of all backgrounds, appear to be. I watched as one guy with a thick Scouse accent was interviewed after he fought in a hard boxing bout against a chap from China, I think, and I remember thinking of how decent and philosophical the man was about his chances of success. The meritocracy of the whole event, and the way it has reached people of all classes, is what has shone through.
For all that I dislike the politicking and corruption that goes along with the Games – I dread the likely bill of the London Olympics, which I oppose – there can be no denying that the folk who have done well in th Games, from all nations, are, with the odd exception maybe, pretty admirable sportsmen and women and that bleatings about their class have not been much in evidence.
Randall continues:
But, for me, the finest moment was when the British men’s coxless fours rowed down the formidable Australians to snatch gold. Some will denigrate them as “posh boys”, largely because they can tell the difference between an adjective and an adverb, but that doesn’t make them substandard Olympians.
Quite. It is a pity, though, that something like accent or polish in a TV studio now is considered a measure of a sportsman or woman. After all, our Jeff speaks with the twang of London, so I am not sure what is going on there.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to match over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in The Constitution of Liberty, by FA Hayek, page 251.
This paragraph remains a superb summary of the essential flaw in what we nowadays call the “nanny state”. Unlike a proper nanny caring for little children, the paternalist state has no interest in raising children into adulthood, but instead, infantilises the public, hence finding ever more justifications for treating the populace like five-year-olds.
At least the moral scolds of the early 19th Century as related in entertaining fashion in this book at least relied, in part, on moral exhortation rather than outright bans all the time, although there was plenty of that. But De Tocqueville and other great classical liberal writers spotted the authortarian dangers of do-gooderism from an early stage in modern, industrial countries. It seems a shame that the lessons have still not been fully learned.
On a related point, I see that California, which seems to be in the grip of puritan buffoons, is now referred to in some parts as “Nannyfornia”. In fact, if you Google up the term, it says, “Did you mean California?”. That’s gotta hurt.
A new film is out later this year in the US taking the p**s out of Michael Moore. It looks quite amusing. Here’s the trailer. Some of the one-liners are excellent.
“We live in a world where Ben Affleck won an Oscar and Robinson didn’t. Where’s your god now?”
Dirty Harry’s Place, talking about the late, very great Edward G. Robinson.
As a fairly regular user of Heathrow Airport and other UK airports such as Gatwick – the former has suffered all manner of problems due to loss of baggage, massive queues – this, on the face of it, looks a good development, but I have my reservations, as I will explain later:
Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) — BAA Ltd., the owner of London’s Heathrow airport, should be broken up and its Gatwick and Stansted terminals sold off to foster competition in the U.K. capital, antitrust regulators said.
The unit of Spanish builder Grupo Ferrovial SA provides a poor service to airlines and passengers and has shown a lack of initiative in planning for additional capacity, the Competition Commission said today, recommending that the company should also be stripped of either Glasgow or Edinburgh airport in Scotland. BAA said the analysis was “flawed.”
Hmm. The problem partly stems from the fact that when BAA was originally privatised by the former Tory government, it was sold as a monopoly. That is not, in and of itself, a terrible thing so long as there are other competing transportation businesses. But there were not other big airports owned by non-BAA businesses to compete, especially against the crucial hub of Heathrow. In a previous Samizdata posting on the Snafu of the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five, one commenter pointed out that one issue that is sometimes overlooked in issues like this is restrictions on new airport builds by the planning authorities. Well indeed. I think there is a good case for building an airport to the eastern side of London, on the flat lands that sit to the north of the Thames (it is not as if this is an area of outstanding natural beauty). It would relieve some of the air traffic now coming over the capital, which would be good for abating noise as well as removing a potential safety and security issue of thousands of aircraft flying into land over the middle of London.
Getting planning permission for a new airport is, under the current system, very difficult. Yes, there are, in the UK, a lot of old, disused military bases left by the RAF and the USAF, such as in Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia and bits of Kent. However, the trouble is that such bases were deliberately built miles away from major urban centres, to prevent the danger that an attack on such a base would hit a large city. So you have th situation of huge runways turning into rubble in the middle of Suffolk but of no real use to commuters in London. So we would need something a bit closer. Another matter to bear in mind is that southern England is not very large: airspace is at a premium and already crowded, if not quite so bad as during the Cold War, when the UK was covered in airbases.
I am not, as a free market purist, at all happy to see a private business broken up at the behest of a state regulator, but then we should recall that BAA was originally put together as a state business and sold as a monopoly as a matter of state policy. When its current owners, the Spanish firm Ferrovial, bought BAA, they must have known that failure to sort out the problems might have incurred the wrath of the regulator. It would be nice in a total free market not to have to bother about such things, but it would have been failure of basic due diligence for Ferrovial’s lawyers not to have warned their managers that competition issue might arise. Well, it jolly well has arisen at last. We would not, as the old joke about the Irishman giving street directions to a tourist, want to start from here. But here is where we are. If there is a chance of putting a large, competitive fire up the backsides of BAA’s management, there is a chance, however slender, that the experience of coming to and from the UK by air might be a tad more pleasant in future.
“Never brush your teeth if you’re dressed in black. Don’t trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle. Always put the shower curtain inside the bath. Life is forever teaching us lessons, and here’s another that I learnt last week: it’s impossible to be mates with celebrities.”
– Sathnam Sanghera
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
